Rev Left Radio - Simone Weil: French Philosopher, Christian Mystic, & Anti-Fascist Radical

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Corey Mohler, aka Existential Comics, joins Breht to discuss the amazing and fascinating life of Simone Weil. Check out Existential Comics here: http://existentialcomics.com/ Follow Corey on Twitter @ExistentialComs Outro music 'Undone' by DeVotchKa ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show Corey Moller, aka Existential Comics, to talk about the life and tribulations and mystical experiences of one Simone Vei. A really interesting episode and conversation on an underappreciated and lesser well-known, but very important sort of revolutionary figure and Christian mystic. So a very interesting combination of traits and interests and just a radical life, an extreme life in every measurable way.

So if this is your first time ever hearing about Simone Vei, you're in for a real treat. And if you have some familiarity with her already, you're still in for a treat because this is a great conversation and Corey is a wonderful guest. So without further ado, let's get into this conversation with Corey Mueller, aka Existential Confer, on The Life of Simone Veigh. Enjoy. This is Corey Moeller, best known as the guy who makes existential comics, and probably a lot of people know me from Twitter as well. Yeah, it's great to have you back. Corey, you've been on before, and we're happy for you to return.

I think in our last episode we talked about you coming back on to talk about the life and thought of Simone Vei. And you've also recently been on our friends, the partially examined life. You've been on their podcast to talk about her work specifically. So if people like this episode and want to hear more about her work, I'll link to that in the show notes so people can go check that out. We love partially examine life. So that was really cool to hear you on there.

But let's just go ahead and start with a general question, which is how did you initially come to be interested in Simone Vei and her life? Well, I guess I'm going to give two answers, like a short answer and kind of a longer answer that's a bit eclectic, I guess. But the first answer is, like I said, on the last episode that we were in, is that she was around. during the time that Sart and Beauvoir were alive in France and she had interacted with them, but in my mind she was really the only one that lived in actual existential life, like a perfect existential life. And really by that, I just mean that there was no conflict between her ideas and her actions at any time. She almost lived like a saintly life, in a sense too. And by conflict between actions and ideas, I just mean like, to give a personal example, I have certain ideas.

about what I should be doing maybe politically or in my life, but a lot of weekends, instead of doing those things, I drink whiskey and watch Love Island, UK, right? So there's like a conflict in my life between my ideas and my actions. For Simone Vei, there really was no conflict. Whatever her ideas were, she did that. And the sort of longer, more mysterious answer, which I was kind of happy was reaffirmed when I read the biography, is that, like in 1865, Dastuio, Joesky wrote crime and punishment, and at the end of the novel, the main character Raskolnikov sort of mysteriously becomes transformed into a saint, and it's a very unsatisfactory ending,

and then he writes, don't worry, I'll deal with this problem in another novel. And 10 years later, he produced the longest and greatest novel ever written, the Brothers Kare Mersov. But anyone who's read that book knows he actually did not deal with the problem, and the reason is because Brothers Care Mirzov wasn't his idea, it was a 900-page introduction to his idea. And there were supposed to be two more novels written.

And the problem that he was dealing with was how to, I mean, very, very summarized, but how to deal with the problem of suffering and still become a good person. Dostoevsky suffered immensely in his life and did not become a good person. But the second problem is how to have faith in God

in a non-naive way. He saw much of religion as sort of priests telling lies to people to reassure them that they would have a better life in the afterlife and that everything was kind of fine. And he said, that's not really religion. You have to understand fully science and fully philosophy and fully human suffering and still have faith. And Simone Vey's biography can be read

as book two and three of the Brothers Caramersup, I think. where Alyosha, the main character, becomes a socialist revolutionary. We know from his notes they weren't written, but we know the plot outline. He loses his faith and becomes a socialist revolutionary, only to give that up, go through enormous suffering, and then become a saint. And that's more or less what Simone Vei's life was. Fascinating. Yeah, I did not know that. That's really insightful. I do think that a lot of people might not know who Simone Vei was.

I didn't know when you first mentioned her to me in our last episode. So for those who have no idea who Simone is, can you give a sort of general view of who she was historically before we get into the details of her life? Right. She was born around, what would it be like, 1910, I guess, and died in her early 30s. So she lived through both World War I and World War II, although didn't see the end of World War II. She was a philosopher that was right around the period. And in fact, like I said, she went to school with Sart and Beauvoir. so she was working in that period of French philosophy and she dedicated most of her life to political activism

as well as teaching philosophy but she never really made an impact on philosophy because I think she just didn't have the time and energy to work on philosophical projects herself as an adult because she was so dedicated to politics and then she sort of had a religious conversion I would say like three or three years before she died

three or four years and wrote about, I guess, theology, you would call it. And so she's known in a lot of Christian circles as a sort of saintly figure for Christians. And also I think she's – this is why she's also kind of very, very unique to me, is that she's sort of a saint for the Christians, in a sense. And she's very much also a saint to me for, like, the left. And what I mean by that is, like, someone like a Gandhi-like figure who not only dedicated their life to political causes, but they did it in this very – personal way of self-denial and abdication to all pleasure and giving everything to the cause so she could

sort of be thought of like a Gandhi figure as well well let's talk about her early life um I want to talk about like you know what was her childhood like maybe mention her brother and just basically talk about the first decade or two of her existence as sort of a foundation understand who she would later become right so She was born into a very normal, upper middle class, bourgeois, Jewish, French family. They weren't practicing Jews. They were agnostic. It was a family of, like, doctors and merchants, not really an intellectual family and not really an activist family. So they were, it's kind of strange that her and her brother both came out of this rather normal family.

She had incredibly supportive parents who assisted her throughout all her life and just supported her and all her, rather wild adventures and dangerous adventures. Her parents were extremely supportive. Her brother was more or less a genius. He was about two or three years older than her, and he ended up becoming sort of a figure in mathematics that contributed theories in a number of ways. And he was not only kind of a math genius,

but he could read literature and memorize it very quickly. And they both became incredibly interested in literature from a very, very young age, like three or four years old, they were reading poems and the Iliad and stuff like that and learning Greek. And her brother's genius did make her kind of like intensely insecure that she was like a stupid person, even though obviously nobody would describe her that way, but she even at one point kind of became a despair because she realized that she for sure was not a genius like her brother. And she thought, what's the point of kind of doing philosophy?

And seeking after truth, if you're not a genius, because you're not going to be able to see as clearly or as deeply as the geniuses. And she got into kind of a depression at one point, even when she was young. She overcame it by realizing that through pure will, she can still do those things. But it has to be extremely pure, dedicated will. And that sort of informs how she behaved later on. The other thing is, like, even from a young age, she had, I think, a unique characteristic among children. and this is something that's not part of her ideology but just kind of part of who she is

because she displayed this from a very young age like children are naturally very very have an acute sense of justice every child has a sense of justice and the way you know this is you give say it's Halloween or something and there's two brothers and you give one of them a large candy bar and you give the other one a small candy bar the child who got the small candy bar will immediately know this is unjust and they'll be intensely unhappy, even if they would have been perfectly satisfied with a small candy bar by itself, right? And you can even do this with monkeys. There's a great YouTube video where they give a monkey a cucumber for a rock, and the monkey is perfectly satisfied with a cucumber until it sees them give a grape to the second monkey for the same

rock, and then it loses this shit. It just totally throws a temper tantrum. It's a hilarious video. But Simone Bay had this characteristic, but it was inverted. So if she were the monkey, she would be upset that she got the grape, or the larger candy bar. She was always incredibly upset when things were unfair, but inverted to most children, in the sense that she was upset if she got an advantage. And the best sort of parable of this is during the war, during World War I, her father was a wartime doctor, and they had to move suddenly. And they had to, like, kind of walk through the snow, like 10 or 15 miles. and she threw down her pack at one point when she realized that her brother was carrying a heavier pack than her, and she refused to move until they were both given an equally

weighty pack. And she was like, you know, four or five years old, and he was maybe eight or nine, so, you know, maybe he should have got a heavier pack, but she was, she thought this was unfair and that she should suffer equally with the rest of the family. That is something that would live on into her adult life, and we'll talk about that in a bit, but moving on sort of chronologically, because I want to cover her life before we get into some of her ideas. Can you talk about her, her time in university, what she studied or was interested in, and specifically maybe talk about her mentor who helped shape her philosophical

outlook? So she went to university to study philosophy and, oh, actually, there's one more part, I would say, she heard this that's kind of related to the self-suffering that she wanted to do, is that she heard this parable about Alexander the Great when she was young. and this would inform her morality. Actually, she might have learned this at university, but her moral outlook always sort of throughout her whole life was maybe informed by this, as well as, of course, her philosophical education.

But when Alexander the Great was crossing the desert, you know, I don't know the details to go conquer some other people, I guess. He had learned that his men were out of water. So what he did is he took his jug of water and he poured it out onto the sand. And she said this was a beautiful moment of ethics, even though it was not useful to anybody. Right?

So it's kind of a weird thing to do. And she said it was beautiful because she realized that all at once, it was surprising, but once it occurred, everybody realized that that's how it had to be. And the reason he did that is kind of to be a leader and to show that he is going to suffer with his men equally. So she always wanted to suffer equally with whoever had misfortune.

But when she went to university, she studied mostly under, like, her, a lot of different places in schools, but her main influence was this philosopher called Elaine. Just had one. These French philosophers are so egotistical. They think they only need one name like Madonna. Yes. It started from Voltaire. He really was terrible.

Voltaire is a made-up name. But he was mostly concerned with this sort of French philosophy at the time that was concerned with the nature of the will. the nature of freedom, sort of like the mind-body problem, and the metaphysics of consciousness. And he had a philosophy of sort of where, it was sort of similar to a platonic philosophy of morality, where willing yourself to become good is the same as ethics. So it's very much against systematic ethics where you add up happiness in the world or anything like that. it was becoming good yourself was not only moral and virtuous, but it was also the same thing

that was beautiful and true. So truth, beauty, and will and ethics are all kind of tied up into the same willing act into the world. So that would be the kind of philosophy she's studying. It's a very normal philosophy. She wasn't a Marxist scholar or anything like that, although she would teach Marx, of course, and read Marx. But she was working on, I guess, what you would say, normal philosophical problems. Well, she, I mean, the way you mentioned her sort of ethical position, it almost sounds like virtue ethics. Is it something close to that? Yeah, I don't think that word was being used in France at the time, but that's certainly how I would characterize it.

It's very much a virtue ethic where it's concerned about the character of the person doing a willing act of ethics, not a kind of rule-based ethics or, like I said, it's obviously not utilitarianism. But yeah, it's definitely closest to virtue ethics. and it's the virtue ethics of the Greeks. She was very, very interested in Greek philosophy, specifically, her entire life. Yeah, that's very interesting. I have a lot of sympathies with virtue ethics, and I didn't know that she was pretty much into that. That's awesome.

Moving on a little bit, let's talk about the incident at Lapeu and what it says about Simone as a person, in your opinion. So can you just talk about that and explain that for our listeners? So when she was at school, she was already a troublemaker. Her nickname was the Red Virgin, Red, obviously, for communism, Virgin because she was a very reserved person who never made herself girly at all.

She dressed in the same outfit all the time, stuff like that, and never, you know, obviously had any boyfriends, you know. She was already causing a lot of trouble politically at school. At one point, like, when she was very young, she tried to unionize the hotel workers at the hotel they were staying at. It was like the Hotel de Chateau.

And someone commented, like, one of the other guests were like, what the hell are you? why are you staying at this hotel if those are your ideas? You know what I mean? Meaning why should anyone who has money care about the fucking hotel staff, you know? But she literally, yeah, she got all the maids together and tried to get them to unionize because she thought they were working too hard. She rabble roused, of course, as a college student all the time, as college students do,

who have radical left ideas. And the university professors sent her to Lapew, which is kind of a small clerical town, a very unimportant clerical town like eight or ten hours away from Paris and that was with the idea that they were going to like to quote I think it's like we're going to send away the Red Virgin forever and never hear from her again

it didn't work out for them because they did hear from her again but they did send her to this small clerical town to teach to give her a teaching position I guess and so she taught philosophy to a small classes but oh and after

school also she did want to go work a factory at this point in time but the economy was bad due to like the Great Depression so she was unable to do that and had to accept this job this teaching job she immediately began to organize though for the unemployed and there were about i want to say like 50 people in the town who were unemployed due to again due to the Great Depression they had lost their jobs in factories or what have you and in order to have some money what the town did is they let them break stones and what that means is just like it sounds you break large stones into smaller stones sort of like we think of like gang prisoners doing this you know back in the day it's very horrible labor and they weren't very good

at it and they were paid by how many stones they would break up so if you weren't very good you would literally not really earn enough to even eat and so she was upset by this and organized she gathered all the unemployed and organized them to march to the mayor. And it was quite a sight for the extremely conservative sort of Christian town to see all these organized, unemployed people march into the mayor's office to demand a meeting with this kind of small, clumsy philosophy professor leading them. And this caused an uproar because they thought she was organizing some kind of, you know, they were marching through the town and singing the internationality and stuff.

So it had a political characteristic. And the mayor granted them higher wages to which she organized them to refuse. So she actually refused the higher benefit because she said, no, you deserve more and we can get more. And they marched through the town again and actually went on strike. And her old philosophy professor, Elaine, when he heard about this in the paper, said, only Simone Vei can organize a strike among the unemployed. you know it's like probably the it's not a very common occurrence for the unemployed to go on strike but they were going on strike and it's kind of actually a unique strike because they were going on strike for charity like the town was more than happy to not pay them the money it's not like

a capitalist strike where they're losing profit it was they were losing debt but it morally embarrasses the town and they ended up getting much better conditions due to this but the town was very, very upset, and the conservatives in the town tried to get her fired from her philosophy job. So this caused a big uproar because all her old philosophy professors and all her trade union contacts, she was already very, very involved with the trade union movement at this time. She had been working to unify the two largest trade unions tirelessly working to do this. And so she had a lot of contacts within the trade union movement and, of course, a lot of contacts within the philosophy community. And everybody, of course, wrote

in her defense, you can't fire her because that's totally inappropriate. It has nothing to do with her job, you know, stuff like that. And as well as her students all signed a petition saying they were going to, well, I don't know what they were going to do, but they all signed a petition saying, do not fire her. So this caused a big uproar and reached papers in Paris and everywhere. And everyone had to kind of comment on this. It was the first time she kind of got, I guess, more widespread into the press organizing this unemployed strike.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, organizing the unemployed like that and going on strike and getting real benefits, fascinating, sort of unprecedented, and never really hear about that sort of movement. And that's so cool that she sort of spearheaded that. And as you're saying, you know, she's a very intensely political person, definitely a sort of radical left-wing activist. I know you just talked about her political life. Maybe talk a little bit more about other actions she participated in. Specifically, you mentioned that she tried to work in a factory earlier, but the economy was so bad that she really couldn't, but she eventually did.

So can you talk a little bit about that as well? Sure. So she was always intensely sort of with the idea that in order to, she really wanted to understand the working class in the concrete details. Like she criticized Lennon and Trotsky saying they never set foot in a factory. How can they really know how to do a revolution that's going to liberate the workers when they really don't know how factories are run? So she wanted to, she always had dreamed of working in a factory earlier.

and she had already at Lapew spent a summer pulling up potatoes on a farm for 10 hours a day. And she had worked on a fishing boat. And she had at one point gone down into a mine to learn how they'd mined. Well, I don't know what kind of mine it was, some kind of metal mine, copper or something. And she had at that point noticed, actually, this was very informative. The mine, I think, first put this idea in her head that the workers were not oppressed so much by their bosses, but they were oppressed by the machines that they had to use. Like the miners had to use this kind of machine

where you would put it up against your body and it would vibrate to kind of... It was like the beginning of mechanical mining and it would kind of thump rhythmically to release the minerals from the earth and it was just very, very unpleasant, you know? And they had to go down for eight hours a day and kind of hold this horrible machine.

But this would really come to a head a couple years after her teaching where she finally got a chance to go work in a factory. She was determined to not only work in the factory but live off the money from the factory exclusively. So she totally cut herself off from her parents to the point where

when she went and visited her parents, she would pay them for the meals that they gave her to make it all fair and square. She always also put herself on the level of the people who suffered the most. So like even when she was in Lapeu, she refused to heat her house and take any luxuries because she knew or she believed that the unemployed weren't able to heat their house so she's like if they can't heat their house I am not going to heat my house

I'm going to live at the level of the people who are lowest and so for like two years she didn't heat her house and then kind of amusingly she found out that the unemployed actually always found ways to heat their homes by gathering firewood or stuff it turned out to be a mistake but she always had that kind of actions where she would put herself at the level of the lowest. Even actually as a child, she refused to eat sugar and sent her chocolates to the war because the soldiers at the front didn't have any sugar or chocolate. But when she entered into this factory, like I would say she found it was much, much worse than she had anticipated.

The factory life was extremely difficult, and it was like an auto factory. so she at first had a job of like pulling down these machines that press the metal and she was a very sickly person sort of extremely clumsy and she also suffered very badly beginning at her time Lepew with headaches that would incapacitate her for days so she had a very very difficult time doing physical labor from just a purely physical sense and at the factory it was like you were paid a rate but if you didn't produce like the proper amount of output of an average worker you got like a pro rated rate so she the average worker was producing like 800 units and no matter how hard she worked she could only produce like 650 so she never even

receive like what would be like minimum wage or whatever so she had a hard time even putting food on her table with this amount of the amount of money that she was receiving. So she was always short on food and working extremely hard in this factory. And the reason she wanted to work in a factory is because she wanted to again, she wanted to be able to reform

the factory itself and reform the very conditions of existence for the workers, not just have a worker's state like the Soviet Union where the factories more or less would remain the same. Because she had thought the factory itself oppresses the worker, even if they're controlled,

by the workers. Like, she wanted direct, she was a, at this time, she was a syndicist, more or less, meaning that she wanted the unions to take direct political control and direct control of the factories. So she said, even if the union, she realized later on, even if the union takes control of the factory, they're still going to be oppressed by the machines, unless we figure out how to reform the factory. And she found, her main insight, she didn't really figure out how to change the factory,

because it's a very difficult problem. but she did discover that something very curious that would present a problem for her to Marxist philosophy, which was that the brutal conditions of the factory did not inspire in the workers revolt. Revolt meaning rebellion. What they did instead is they inspired docility and submission. Like she found her mind was just getting beat down

to the point where she would just obey orders instinctively and she saw this in the other workers as well. And so there was no real camaraderie between, the workers which upset her deeply and there was no real rebellion they just kind of accepted their fate and in particular the most unskilled workers who were paid the lowest were the most docile and that was sort of the women workers especially they were just because the women were given the worst jobs so she found that these factories were producing docile what she said were beasts of burden she said if she didn't have sunday off like they had they only worked six days a week at

that time, she would have completely been transformed into a beast of burden, and she's certain that no rebellion ever could have happened, you know? And not only that, but she said one of the reasons that she never could meet her quotas was that she could not properly, as you're supposed to, completely shut off her mind from thinking. So she was there as a philosopher and as a journalist and someone who was attempting to reform the factory, so she had to always kind of think, and also she just naturally as a thoughtful person. She said, that kills your efficiency with the machine. In order to become 100% efficient, you have to 100% turn off your mind and just become a kind of become a machine yourself. And this was part of, it's called Taylorism.

It's like scientific management that was popular in the United States in the early 1900s and actually became popular among Lenin and Stalin as well, which is sort of an empirical technique to examine factories to become as efficient as possible. And it ended up becoming very brutal because in order to become peace, efficiency you have to do these things like destroy the worker's spirit you know the Soviet Union tried to do away with the those parts of it like they didn't want to part of part of scientific management is brutally oppressing the worker and driving their wages down and Lenin said we're going to do away with that part but we're going to take the empirical approach of improving productivity as far as possible and she was sort of against

this Taylorism the whole time she said it's just no matter what you do you can't use science on workers because workers are human beings they're not instruments Yeah. No, I actually completely like relate to that. I've obviously worked a whole slew of terrible mind-numbing, soul-crushing jobs. And it really is like it really beats down your mind, your emotional state. One thing we have that they didn't at that time or one thing that got me through some of my worst jobs was being able to put in actually like podcasts and shit like that so that my mind can stay active. My mind can keep turning over problems, engaging with stuff intellectually while my body sort of fell into the rhythms of. of when I was washing dishes or whatever job I had at that time, my body could sort of do that stuff while my mind stayed at least above the threshold of complete, you know, obliteration. But it still didn't completely prevent the mental and emotional chaos and pain, you know, in me and fellow coworkers, but at least it sort of helped a little bit.

So not having that and having even a more sort of dominated and work environment where you're really just doing these very simple actions all day long. I mean, it really does crush the spirit of somebody. And so her position on like, you know, these people are actually very docile. They're actually sort of submitted. It's almost a form of learned helplessness, you know. And I can relate to that. And I definitely saw that at jobs throughout my life,

but especially the lower jobs, the shittier jobs. People really were sort of beaten down in a way where it wasn't even in their political imagination that they could organize and fight back on any of. level, you know. Yeah, I myself have worked at manual labor jobs, and I remember actually before I got my first job, I kind of wanted to work at a job that was like nothing but repetitive physical actions because I thought my mind would be so free and I'm going to think, I thought like, oh, look how much time I'll have to kind of think and let my mind wander while I do the work. And it turned out to be totally the opposite. I never got any thinking done because the job itself just kind of took over, even though

you're just doing repetitive tasks over and over again. It just takes over your mind, kind of. Totally. Yeah, it really does. And I know you've talked, you've been talking about her critiques of Trotsky and Lenin, and you said that she is a syndicalist. Maybe talk a little bit more about her political ideology. Would you call her straight up anarchist?

Did she think of herself as an anarchist? And then if there were any more critiques of Marxism, maybe you could lay those out for us as well. So she never called herself an anarchist or I think really sympathized with anarchism too much at all? Well, certainly she had anarchist tendencies for sure because she was extremely, extremely suspicious of any bureaucracy, including the bureaucracies within the trade union movement, like professional trade unionists. She was always suspicious of that. So she certainly had kind of that personal tendency towards anarchism, but she never called herself an anarchist.

Syndicalism, yeah, wanting the unions to take direct power. She didn't necessarily want to abolish the state. She wanted the state to look very different. Like she wanted to maybe abolish the police or something like that, but not the state itself, I don't think. She did debate, like she hosted Trotsky even at her house once and did fiercely debate them on the nature of the Russian project. In particular, she believed that the Russian state was not a worker state, and Trotsky fiercely defended it, even though he was already kind of out at this time. She kind of agreed with Trotsky's position on the problem of socialism in one state. like she said she would vigorously defend Stalin if she thought it was possible

to build socialism in one country but she did not think it was possible and the reason for that is because the Soviet Union was going to be trapped in the capitalist game of ever-increasing production so like the United States would keep increasing production and efficiency and that meant increasing their

kind of power and Stalin in the Soviet Union had to do the same thing in order to compete with the United States It's like he can't go at a slower pace because then the capitalist imperialist powers are just going to destroy him. So she thought Stalin more or less has to be a capitalist and drive the workers as hard as possible to increase efficiency. And she says, so there's really not a ton of difference between the two in their individual life of the workers. Both are being kind of oppressed, one by the bureaucracy, the other by the capitalists.

But because they're in competition with each other, that's a capitalist competition. Right. So she said This isn't a worker state at all This is state capitalism or whatever And that was her criticism More or less of the Soviet Union For Marx

I think she was one of these people Right up until the very end at least That said Marx got it right We have to follow the Marxist Not the Marxist doctrine But the Marxist method But we have to apply it in the 70 years That you know

Obviously Marx didn't anticipate everything Because he lived in time that didn't see, you know, new things that had emerged in the last 70 years, like global finance and in particular fascism. Marx did not understand the rise of fascism, of course, because he didn't, wasn't able to witness it, you know. But at the very end of her life, she did turn against Marxism as well. And the reason for that is because she said Marx believed that when society would come to a certain

point where the workers had a lot of power, the revolution would occur. he sort of believed that like the workers possessed the real power in society in fact because they were producing everything and they were only oppressed by the police, the military and the bureaucracy of the capitalists and then the revolution would come at that moment in the most advanced industrial society and the workers would take control and she says this this is a mistake because the workers will take control of the police, the military and the bureaucracy and because of sort of the psychological nature of force, direct force, she believed there's no way to abolish these oppressive forces in society by changing regimes. They have to be abolished before the

revolution. So the police, the military, and the bureaucracy, if they exist, will always turn oppressive no matter who controls them, even if the workers control them democratically, they'll be oppressive because their very existence is oppression and you can't sort of abolish oppression from wielding it like you can't wield almost like the one ring or something in lord of the rings right like you can't wield it uh you have to abolish it by dismantling the oppressive institutions not by seizing control of them that does seem very sort of anarchistic um it's interesting yeah she does seem like an anarchist in a lot of her positions but again she never called herself an anarchist and actually defended herself against being called an anarchist but she's very close to an

in a lot of her ideas for sure. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. Yeah, one of the tragic ironies of the Soviet Union, which you really gestured at there, was the fact that they were surrounded and really, you know, structured by a capitalist and imperialist world. And therefore, you know, this focus on production and economism and the productive forces was in play. And the sad thing about the Stalin is like, if he didn't do that, if it didn't take that course, how are they going to beat back the Nazi beast, you know, ultimately? And so that very same thing that you can rightfully critique about the Soviet Union was also the thing that helped them defeat the Nazis and sort of stay alive in this very hostile environment. So, I mean, just take that for what it's worth,

but that's sort of where my mind goes. There's really an impossible position, and sometimes during the Soviet Union's rise and, you know, maintenance of itself. Yeah, and I would like to say that she very much agreed with that. Okay. So she never at any point blamed Stalin. She actually believed Stalin sort of in a sense took all the right moves. She thinks Stalin was powerless to do otherwise. And so that means the very nature of the revolution was a mistake. Or maybe you wouldn't call it a mistake because I don't think what else could they have, should they have done maybe? Certainly not continue the royalist regime. But she didn't think that the Soviet Union was bad because Stalin was a baddie, you know, by any means. She knew that Stalin was only

doing what he was doing because he was trapped in this larger game of force. And she thought force itself was the main political actor, unlike Marx, where it was. exploitation and labor. She said force as the actor, Stalin had to do what he did because again, he was competing with capitalist America. And like you said, if Stalin wasn't so obsessed with rapid industrialization, the Nazis would have just rolled through him. So she knew that. And she said, we have to avoid, if we're going to do a true revolution, the conditions for the revolution have to be different. Otherwise, you're going to end up with Stalin again, because again, you're just, what else could he have done, right? He had to industrialize to defend himself.

Absolutely. That's really interesting. I mean, there's a lot of nuance. It's not this, you know, sort of simplistic, stereotypical, shallow critique. It is thoughtful. And that really speaks to to her sort of complex thinking and nuance on this issue, even though she ultimately came down on one side sort of with her position on what revolution in that way can and can't accomplish. So she was very active politically and internationally. Can you talk about her involvement? in the Spanish Civil War, and then her views on fascism broadly, because she was really alive as fascism was on the rise. Sure. So in 1936, the Popular Front government won victories in both France and Spain, and the Popular Front is sort of a broad left-wing kind of social democratic

coalition. And in France, this actually caused a bunch of very positive reforms. It was sort of like a big movement. It was celebrated by a national strike in France. And they actually reformed a lot of her criticisms of the factories, and the factories became a little more humane during this time. But unfortunately, in Spain, when the Popular Front won, this resulted in a fascist military coup. So what she did when the Spanish Civil War broke out was, like some other intellectuals and activists, she traveled to Spain in order to literally pick up a gun and fight, even though she was a very clumsy, kind of near-sighted person. Probably not, you know, you wouldn't want her next to you, maybe in the war, defending you, because she was not very physically skilled.

Yeah. But she did go to Spain. She sort of lied to her parents and said that she was going there as a journalist, but she immediately found one of the leaders of the POUM, which is the sort of Marxist coalition that was fighting with the anarchists. And I guess their leader had been captured or was missing, and she asked for like a secret mission to go into the fascist area and try to rescue him, which would be just extraordinarily dangerous.

And she was denied this mission because they're like, no, that's a suicide mission. And not only that, if we were going to send someone, it would be like a more James Bond figure than you. You know what I mean? Like, they thought she would just be captured immediately and just like, I don't think so. And plus people kind of know you. She was actually sort of known already at this time. Probably the fascist in Spain.

I doubt knew who she was. but so instead she joined uh sort of an international battalion there were like 25 international people of french and english and then it sort of grew larger and she learned how to use a rifle and went into the territories and was looking for skirmishes and they were very close at some points to like the spanish fascists had just moved out of the area that they had moved into and were close to getting in fights um she did witness sort of executions of fascists and some of the horrors that were on the anarchist side where she saw the machinery of war kind of transformed this beautiful, idealistic anarchist revolution

into sort of a normal army that was just brutal where they were celebrating how many priests they had killed and how many fascists they had killed and stuff like that and hanging people that really they shouldn't be, you know, and she witnessed even like her unit captured a 15-year-old fascist and the commander of their unit said I'll explain to him they tried to give him like a lecture on anarchism why it's this beautiful philosophy

and they said we'll give you 24 hours to convert to anarchism and fight with us and this 15-year-old boy refused to renunciate fascism so they shot him in the head and she thought that was she didn't she thought that was actually very noble both of the child sort of in a sense even though he has the wrong ideas, obviously. But also her commander did give him the chance. But then

due to her near-sightedness, she like stepped into a burning oil pot and severely burned her leg and had to be leave the front and really eventually go back to France because the medical supplies there were not very good. And even though she quickly became disenchanted with the war and thought that the anarchist revolution would result in another kind of Stalinism when they took power. Even though they were anarchists, she thought, again, if you seize power, you can't destroy instantly the apparatus of force. So even though she believed that, she still wanted to go back and pick up a gun again and go fight with the anarchists because she never wanted to deny herself danger or suffering on behalf of her ideas, even again if she was a little very skeptical of

this time that the revolution would be kind of a real revolution in her mind. But she never got that chance to go back, but she certainly was willing to die on the front to help defeat fascism, which she thought, of course, was just the most horrible thing to rise, in particular the nationalism and the war-like characteristics of fascism, where they worship war. She intensely at this point was fighting to prevent a war with Germany because she thought Second World War would be the biggest disaster in human history. And she was willing to do almost anything to prevent the war with Germany. including she would have thought experiments where she's like,

what if we just give the Germans whatever they want? What if we just give in to them and let them win? Because she thought the war would be so disastrous. So she was very much in favor of Neville Chamberlain's policies of giving Hitler, letting him annex countries and stuff. Like France had a defense pact with, I think, Czechoslovakia, and the Germans were thinking of invading. And she says, let's just give them, let's just let them have it.

Because even if they outlaw, like the Germans, main two obsessions were outlying the Communist Party and outlying Jews. She's a Jewish communist, more or less a communist. So this would, of course, affect her personally, but she said, look, let's just let them do it. It's not going to be so bad. World War II will be bad, right? And I think at this time, she thought outlying Jews, as she phrased it, meant you're not allowed to teach anymore and you're not allowed to have official positions in the government

and you have to work on the farm, she didn't think it meant killing them at this point in time or I think her opinions probably would have been different. And, yeah, she just didn't, she didn't see that anti-Semitism. She didn't realize how far it really could go. But she did everything she could to prevent World War II right up until the war began. So then, yeah, that leads perfect in the next question,

which was what was her reaction to World War II and what did she end up doing during the war? Her reaction to the war, was immediately to do absolutely anything she could to defeat the Germans. Her ideas about pacifism very rapidly changed when the war began. She again wanted to pick up a gun and shoot Nazis. You know, she was not allowed to do that as a woman. But she said, let's do anything we can to defeat the Nazis.

And to the point when the armatists was called, when the Germans occupied France, some of her pacifist friends celebrated it because, oh, okay, maybe the war has kind of stopped now and the killing has stopped. And she said violently attacked them, saying, no, we have to do anything to defeat Hitler at this point. The pacifism is over. And so when the war broke out, she immediately started doing any effort she could to assist the war effort whatsoever. And her brother was in Finland, and he actually refused to report for duty. And she blamed herself because of all the pacifist ideas that she had been talking about with him. So he refused to report and sort of abandoned France, I guess, in her mind. But it didn't do him a lot of good because in Finland, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland,

the Finns thought he might be a spy because he had correspondence with Russian mathematicians. He was working as a mathematician at this time. so he ended up being exile or like they arrested him and kicked him out to Sweden and Sweden sent him to France where he was sentenced to five years in prison for desertion I guess and he opted at this point to be sent to the front

because he wasn't a coward he thought he owed it to himself to work on mathematics he was sort of obsessed with this philosophical idea and mathematical ideas but at this point he opted to be sent to the front to in his sentence he would go to the front but he still had to finish his sentence

after he came back but he didn't see much action because of course the Germans took over so quickly and then he came back to France under the Vichy government and sort of did this almost like a George Costanza plot from Seinfeld where nobody was sure if his sentence still applied

because the Vichy government did they care about French deserters nobody really knew so what he did is he just went around and acted super confident and shook all the hands of all his former philosophy or mathematics professors and just acted like the sentence no longer applied and then nobody arrested him so he never had to serve the five years because he just if I just pretend like like it's fine then everybody will assume it's fine and that's exactly what happened the best bluff of all time yeah but as for simone vay she wanted

to stay in paris and conduct like a guerrilla warfare against the germans she was upset that everyone was fleeing Paris when the Nazis were going to come in, but only to realize that the people who were staying in Paris with her were doing so because they thought the Germans were civilized people and they could make some kind of deal and continue their lives as normal. So she said, oh, so it turns out all the good people are the ones who are fleeing. Like, these people don't want to do a guerrilla warfare at all. They want to just make a pact with Germany and live under the Viji government. So she fled to Marseille, which is in the sort of free French territory or the unoccupied

zone and they of course made a pact with vichy government the vichy government ran things but she uh went out to live in this free zone and she again wanted to do anything that was possible including like she was trying to get in contact with the military people and she wanted at one point to like they wanted she wanted them to paratroop her into germany i think or maybe i i don't know where but she wanted to get paratrooped into this area where there had been German resistors who were arrested and tried to rescue them from prison. Again, kind of a extravagant plot that you can't imagine.

You know, like she's going to die, you know, if she does this. But she was so committed to doing something to help the war that she said, she told the commander that she was trying to pitch this to. Like, if you do it without me, I'm going to throw myself under a bus. And so she read the newspaper every day to see if they were going to do this paratrooper plan. She didn't make idle threats. You know, she was going to kill herself if they did it without her.

And then her second plan that she tried to do up until the day she died was form a contingent of frontline nurses. And what that would mean was like she was going to get volunteers among women to go to the front lines and put themselves in imminent danger like with the bullets and everything, the real front lines so that way they could leave the suffering of the wounded. because she realized that was kind of the only thing maybe that they were going to let a woman do in the war because she wasn't allowed again to pick up a gun and shoot really

and also she was cut off from the armies anyway at this point she was desperately trying to get to England throughout this entire time because England was the last country fighting and there was nothing she could do in occupied France to like you can't shoot a Nazi you know there's no front so she tried very desperately to get to England throughout this entire time her brother had fled to New York and she wrote him like

okay I'll go to New York which is very difficult too to get out of France but she's like we might be able to get to America but you have to swear to me you have to promise that we're going to be able to get from America to England he sort of was like well maybe you can maybe you can't

and he maybe exaggerated a little bit but eventually with her parents she ended up fleeing to New York for some time with the idea that eventually you're going to get to England and continue to fight. And did that ever come about? Did she ever get to England? So she more or less got trapped in New York for about a year because it was very, very difficult to get from New York to

England. And she politically sort of became a lot of despair. She really, really wanted to get to England. But she said if she does end up getting trapped in America, what she was going to do is go to the South and work among the black workers because she always wanted to work among the most depressed people and live the life of the most oppressed people in any society. In America, that was the black workers in the South. But eventually, she did, after about a year, end up finding passage to England. And once again, when she got in England, she tried to organize this project of the wartime workers.

Apparently, it got all the way up to Charles de Gaul who said, she's a mad woman. We're never going to do this plan of sending women out to the front line, really probably for, you know, patriarchal reasons. yeah so she ended up more or less working and the only she would take any job in the resistance but she wanted the most dangerous suffering job possible which is of course this wartime workers obviously she really would have preferred to pick up a gun and I'm a little suspicious that her wartime nurses plan wasn't just a plan to get her to the front lines and then she she might have picked up a gun you know but she ended up working more or less writing they needed people

to do work to write on what they were going to do when the war was over And they gave her that job of like, how are we going to reconstitute France and figure out a way for this to never happen again by making a pact between nations and stuff? And so she wrote an enormous amount during this time. Her headaches were always getting worse and worse. She suffered from these horrible migraines and her health ended up deteriorating. But essentially what she did in England was work to write these philosophical tracks mostly about how to reconstitute society. without this kind of thing happening again and what to do about the problem of the French government. She was very worried that Charles de Gaul was going to take over and become a fascist himself in France.

So she was working for the resistance, which he was the leader of, but also trying to prevent him from kind of coming to power in a sense. Now, you know, I think of Sartre and so one of Sartre's big lines is like you must understand society through the lens of the most oppressed. And it looked like, you know, Simone Vey took that even further and said you must live like the most depressed, which is a fascinating sort of extension of Sartre's idea there. But that brings up the question that I kind of want to ask, which is she's in France. She's in the intellectual milieu. She's in occupied France for a while. And that's very the same time when like Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were very active. So did they have any connections with her and how deep did those connections go if they exist? No, she really did not like the existentialist or the existentialist

project. She thought it was a sort of egotistical, individualistic project. I don't think she was, I think Sarton Beauvoir stayed in Paris, so they were physically disconnected from her. She did run, she joined a Christian network of resistance people who sort of did the same thing that they did, which was distribute illegal pamphlets, illegal anti-war prop, or illegal resistance propaganda. But she wasn't directly working with them or really was a little disconnected of them, because like I said, they were in Vichy, Paris, and she was in an occupied, most of them. all she did very much dislike the existentialist too because she viewed that philosophy as not a solution for the workers i would say or for politics sort of paralleling the marxist criticism of existentialism which is interesting did camus admire her though i thought i heard somewhere that camus had some really nice things to say about a simon yes uh camus called her

the great spirit of the age and really thought she was the most again sort of for the same reasons I do. They thought she lived this great existentialist life and this perfect, pure, loving life where she gave everything to the cause, you know, and lived 100% according to her ideals. So, and I think Beauvoir and Sart admired her greatly as well. But Camus not only admired her personally, but when he read her last kind of great work, which is the need for roots that she wrote right towards the end. He thought that was actually a kind of manual to build a society, and it's a very strange book.

A lot of people kind of, Charles de Gaul sort of, it was written supposedly to be read by these people, and they kind of read it and said, I have no idea what this woman is talking about. But he also admired her intellectually, like her actual work that she was producing, and thought there was really something to this kind of, it's conservative in ways where she, She thought you have to build communities that have history and people have a feeling of belonging in the world and respect for each other. But, yeah, all the existentialists admired her greatly. Yeah.

And I can see the particular parallels between, like, Camus and her and why Camus particularly would, you know, really, really go out of his way to say how much he admired her. It seems like their political views on some level seem to match up maybe slightly better than hers would with Sartre and day before, you know. Right, that's true. Kimu was also sympathetic to syndicalism, maybe suspicious of bureaucracy, whereas Sart and Beauvoir maybe became Maoist at the end. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Before we move on to her religious views, is there anything else about her as a person that you want to make sure people know about or that you found particularly interesting or surprising in your research and understanding of her? Yeah, I think the main thing to remember about her is really this idea to always, that she always had this concept of putting yourself through the suffering and to understand understand concretely the reality of the people who suffered the most. She didn't think you could understand it by reading, kind of like you implied.

She definitely had this almost psychological need to always put herself at the position of those who suffered the most. Like even, like, during the war, she would even like sleep on the floor because she thought maybe the soldiers. Actually, it wasn't really explained why she slept on the floor during the wartime period, but most likely because she thought the soldiers were sleeping on the floor out in the battlefields. And she wanted to really understand and never put herself an advantage over other people.

Like also during Occupied France, like they would hand out these food coupons. And she would never eat more than the food coupon, even though everyone else was kind of cheating the system and getting more food on the side, which was like accepted, you know? Yeah. But she always would only eat her fill because she knew if she had even one bite more than these food coupons, she was theoretically taking food from someone else. So she would, to a very extreme extent, that's why she's kind of like a saint. She has this very saintly position where she allows herself to suffer from a moral sense. It's, again, it's like a personal virtue ethics, not, she wasn't always necessarily helping other people by doing this. Like, you're not helping anyone by sleeping on the floor out of solidarity.

But from a need to examine her own moral actions and her willing virtue, she had to go through these things in order to become kind of a, moral person in the platonic sense where virtue is tied up with knowledge and beauty yeah she really is Alexander the Great continually pouring out her water into the sand you know yeah she really is yeah and the one person actually that she admired during this period was Lawrence of Arabia who she thought showed a kind of unique figure in history where he was able to be a soldier in the war and live a soldierly life while still being kind of a moral, amazing, virtuous person. Absolutely. All right.

Now, I do want to shift for this last part of this conversation to her religious and mystical side. When you Google Simone, when you look into her life, she often gets, you know, labeled as a mystic, and that's really an important part of who she was and understanding her life. Before we get into her mysticism, can you just maybe talk about Simone's religious development over time and then how she eventually came to embrace Christian? Christianity? Her parents were, like I said, agnostic Jews in France, so she didn't grow up with religious outlook. She had never stepped foot in a synagogue until she was in America,

where she kind of went and went out of curiosity. But she was very disconnected from her Jewish heritage in the sense that she didn't understand or know the Jewish religion. She considered herself Western in the sense that her upbringing was Hellenistic, like Greek, and Christian. in the cultural sense she did in school say that she believed in God but very much the god of the philosophers like the God of Spinoza

like yes I believe in God like okay something created the universe but that's as far as I'll go so she kind of had an agnosticism where she leaned towards believing in God but in a very dry sense and that lasted up until

around maybe 1937 and this is right I think I think it's, some of it is related to the fact that intellectually her ideas were beginning to turn against Marxism and turn against the revolutions in the sense that she thought no glorious revolution was possible. So she was a bit in despair of politics. She thought the unions couldn't take power either because that would not really work out. She witnessed the popular front, like the social Democrats, even though she never believed that was going to work to begin with. after two years all their gains were reversed because it kind of just lost momentum and as social Democrats do they kind of have their gains reversed by by the next party or by the political

reality so she traveled to Italy and Portugal at this time and she was she very much always thought that the churches were beautiful and the Gregorian chance in particular of the Catholics were beautiful and I think she had a first sort of experience when she traveled to Portugal after working as a worker in the factory where she saw what she described as real affliction for the first time because the conditions were very, very bleak in Portugal at that time and she saw the fishers wives would go around and sing these Catholic hymns to their husbands

before they went off to work or whatever and she had the distinct impression that Christianity was what she said, the religion of slaves, kind of a Nietzschean way of looking at it, and that she herself was a slave. She used the word slave extensively in her factory work. She did not make much of distinction between what was going on in those factories and slavery.

So she began at that time in Portugal to see Christianity as something that she might be part of, even though she did not describe herself as a Christian until a couple years later. And then in particular, she had one mystical experience what you would call she had been going to mass at easter to hear these chants that she thought was beautiful and she met this one i think he was a young italian man who she described as kind of an angelic look about him and he had an angelic nature maybe as well and he gave her this

poem um love it was called by george herbert if people want to look it up and she had been reading this poem, her headaches were intensifying brutally at this period. At one point, she had to take a year off work because her headaches more or less incapacitated her. And she was going through an extremely intense headache while reading this poem. And in her words, Jesus Christ appeared to her, like she directly experienced God touching her, not like as an apparition or anything, but she experienced something where she thought she was experiencing God directly. and the author of the biography that I read said that what's amazing about this isn't that she experienced Jesus Christ appearing directly, which is of course a miraculous event, but it is very amazing that she believed it because she was, again, an intellectual, like going back to the sort of Dasoeski's theme of having a religion without naivety, she was an intellectual, she understood that the world was deterministic and all these advances of science. She studied science throughout her entire life, not just, philosophy, physics.

She studied economics, too. So she was not naive in the sense. So why did she believe this is a rather mysterious thing? It's because she had a very powerful mystical experience. And that pushed her towards Christianity. Even though even after this, curiously, she wouldn't quite describe herself as a Christian. And her behavior didn't change very much.

Like some people who knew her during this period were shocked when her first, I guess what you would call Christian, essay came out Gravity and Grace, which is one of the most famous ones that Christians read today. And they were like, I couldn't believe it. They had had discussions with her about Christianity during this period that she was writing it, and they thought that she was just a scholar who was interested in Christianity. So her conversion to Christianity was very slow. In a sense, even though she had, again, these mystical experiences where she directly witnessed God. But after that, she became very fascinated with Catholicism in particular she was interested in. But she also

read Hindu texts and some Buddhist texts and became very interested in ancient religion. She very much believed that all the religions were true if they were on this sort of true path towards love and goodness. She thought Christianity had been corrupted by the Romans tremendously. She actually thought the Romans were more or less in the same vein as Hitler. And she was upset that like in Europe, we're kind of taught to admire the Romans, like growing up, oh, these great Romans, their great organizational skills, their great state. She thought they more or less extinguished the cultures of the places they conquered and were the first prototype of totalitarian domination through force and had, through Roman

influence, more or less perverted Christianity to one of conquest and force. But she began to move more and more towards Catholicism, although she never officially became a Catholic. And the reason for that is that she could not be baptized for various reasons. The first of which was that she thought she wasn't a good enough Catholic to do it, or she thought she wasn't advanced enough in her spirituality to become a Catholic, which is kind of a thing that in particular she would worry about. Obviously, anyone who knows Catholics, most of them, or any religion, most of them are casual

about it. She was very upset when she went to church and would walk out and people would be gossiping and stuff immediately after church about. petty matters. You know, most people, of course, are not intensely spiritual. They're just going to the church as a social club. But the second reason is one that the priests agreed with. She has this one essay called Letter to a Priest, where she talks about this, where she was a heretic. She, in order to be baptized into the Catholic Church, and the reason she wanted to be baptized into the Catholic Church intensely was to receive the sacrament. And people who are

unfamiliar with Catholicism, what that means is like anyone can go to a Catholic Mass, but not everyone can receive communion. And that's when you get up and you eat this wafer that's been transformed into the body of Christ, the Eucharist, by the priest, and go through this ritual of the sacrament. And she wanted to do this very bad, but you need to be baptized to do this. And she couldn't be baptized because she had these heretical opinions. Most of all, that the Bible was wrong, for example, in the Old Testament. Like, she thought, she thought, thought when God commanded the Hebrews to kill their enemies, she said this is wrong. This never happened because this can't be what God is like or whatever.

This is anti-Christian. So she had opinions that were in order to be baptized at the end of the baptism, or before the ritual, you have to profess that you believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church. She did not believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church because she had disagreements with them. And the third reason is because she thought in order to accept that, in order to become a true Catholic, you had to kind of turn off your, I guess your intellectual side because you can no longer be a philosopher if your ideology is constrained by the church, right?

So she refused to, she could never stop being a philosopher. And she thought if you join the church officially, you have to stop being a philosopher. You could be a Catholic theologian, but you can no longer be a philosopher that's open to anything. So she said, the only time I could possibly be baptized is right before my death

because at that moment I could convert completely because I would never need this philosophical side of my mind again. But that doesn't resolve the second issue of her heretical opinions, which, so she worked in the last years of her life tremendously to try to answer the question over whether the Catholic Church would accept her baptism without her giving up the heretical opinions, which is something they had never done before. And she didn't want just a priest to baptize her.

You probably could have found a priest to kind of do it, I guess, on the slide. Because a lot of priests you found within the Catholic Church, like you could talk to one priest, and they would have a different opinion from another priest about which teachings of the Catholic Church are strict and which are lenient. So she found the Catholic doctrine actually very mercurial and shifting. So she had a hard time grasping what exactly she needed to commit to. This is very important for her. What do I need to commit to? And it's a very difficult question to answer because priests.

have different opinions. But she would not accept a baptism from a priest acting as kind of a rogue agent, which she certainly could have found. But she wanted the Catholic Church as a body to be able to baptize her officially. And she could never get this question answered, so she was never baptized, unfortunately. Even though there's actually some mystery that apparently at her deathbed, someone performed the rights over her head anonymously, or not anonymously, but they anonymously confessed to this. They never gave their name.

But she never received the Eucharist, so I don't think she ever thought of herself as being baptized. Well, that's fascinating. And often, and I want to kind of shift into talking more about the mystical side because, you know, often when I read about Simone, she almost always gets labeled as a mystic, as I said. And in fact, she might be more well known among, like, spiritual Christian mystics than among radical leftists. And as someone like myself who's like intensely interested in Buddhism and has had a meditation practice for my entire adult life, I found this part of her life particularly.

fascinating so can you talk a little bit about her her major spiritual experiences i think she had like three and then like just talk maybe a little bit about the the philosophy that she ultimately came to with regards to those spiritual experiences right uh well like i said there was the one time when she was reading the the poem love that had the most profound effect on her and again seeing the portuguese women uh actually i'm not sure what the third one is maybe that you're referring to but um so she became more also during her spiritual development at this time she also became more interested in platonic philosophy and actually one of her heretical opinions was that christianity needed to return to quote unquote its roots of greek philosophy which is a very

strange thing to say to a catholic because or to any christian because the greek philosophers were not christians right right but the reason she's saying stuff like that is because She very much did not believe that the Christians were right and other religions were wrong. And she saw Plato, even though we don't think of Plato was a religious figure, she very much saw Plato as doing the same thing that the Christians were doing and the Buddhists and the Hindus. She would use the word Krishna for God in casual conversation throughout her life. So, of course, Christians maybe didn't exactly like that either, that she believed all these religions were correct.

And the reason it's so attached to Plato, again, is because I sort of hinted at earlier, is that Plato had this idea that knowledge is the same as virtue. So if you have perfect knowledge, you will be perfectly virtuous, right? And that's, I think, part of the driving factor of her Christianity is that God, the conception of God for her is not that which created the universe or that which, you know, performed all these divine miracles or whatever. whatever it is, it's that which is perfectly good. So it's perfect goodness in God, and it's unknowable to us because it's transcendent, that is to say, outside of empirical reality. We can never detect it through science. But we can, she believed, orient ourselves and our souls towards the good.

And she thought all the religions more or less not only knew how to do this, but more or less agreed on what to do, right? And if you study ancient religions and look at them, a lot of them, There are very, a lot of similarities throughout history over what we thought was the good, right? Purifying ourselves in a certain sense, having a loving attitude towards humanity, things like that. And she thought this kind of spiritual purification of the soul and platonic effort to increase our knowledge of the good and act towards the good and towards virtue was the divine spirit. And you were acting towards God. And I would say that was the major driver of her religious philosophy and experience.

And that was what she committed to herself towards the end of her life. Even though still after all this religious stuff, she was still writing an immense amount of political philosophy. Like you said, she is more remembered as a mystic Christian, probably because she got popular there. And she never quite, she got, she was one of these figures that sort of got forgotten in political philosophy and political history, I guess. But in her life, I would say probably 98% of her essays, or maybe 95% of her essays were about the cause of what you would broadly call Marxism or communism. That is how to get the workers in control of their lives and of society. And probably about maybe 4% was spiritual stuff. And then she wrote some.

She never really, unfortunately, she said that she had two or three lives to live. She would have loved to be kind of a regular philosopher who worked on regular philosophical problems. But as an adult, unfortunately, she never had the time to really do that. But by volume, her writing is mostly on leftist philosophy. But her spiritual writing became very impactful. Again, she was, you know, I know I'm not the Pope, unfortunately, so I don't get to canonize people. But I view her, she very much was like a saint. So that's why a lot of Christians sort of view her as a saint in her writings.

She had a very saintly characteristic, lived this life. that's very appealing to Christian saints. This life of self-suffering is, of course, a very Christian idea. It's not a Marxist idea at all. Marx, of course, never would have a say, oh, you have to sleep on the floor if the other workers are sleeping on the floor. It's totally ridiculous in Marxism. But as a personal virtue ethics point of view, it's very coherent. And from a Christian point of view, it's also very coherent.

And a mystical, really every mystical religion, again, in the East, religions that she was reading about, Buddhism, Hindu, they were very into asceticism, possibly even more than the Christians at times and self-denial and self-suffering, starving your body, intentionally putting yourself in dangerous situations and going through affliction. She was very much sort of obsessed with the idea of affliction, and it was actually kind of a problem for her because she didn't want to be egotistical. So she would obviously intentionally put herself in these dangerous situations. She, in fact, almost certainly wanted to die kind of a hero's death, I think, many times. That's why she volunteered for these suicide missions, because I think she thought that would be the culmination of this beautiful life. But she knew very well that affliction is not something

that you impose upon yourself. It has to be imposed upon by the world. Self-imposed affliction is kind of a fake affliction, right? So she sort of desired to go through some kind of suffering to purify her soul or something along those lines or to put herself through it. But it had to be imposed upon from outside of her. And, of course, in the end, she actually did get her wish. And she did not die in a voluntary suicide mission, but was sort of killed by disease. Well, we can talk about her death in a bit, I guess. But, yeah, at the end of her life, she was very much in sort of a personal sense.

Again, she was kind of in despair about politics. She thought the political revolution was maybe possible in the future, but like in 100 years or something. She didn't see any way for it to come about now. And she became very concerned with this mystical moving towards a loving, pure, perfect self. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, the Buddha himself went through a very deep, ascetic phase where you just deny the body any sort of pleasure at all. He eventually got past that.

But she really does this, a core element of mysticism is this sort of losing of the self, this direct experience of God, not through the intellect, not through dogma or doctrine, but through, you know, visceral experience. And when she talks about not having a sense of a self or that, you know, sort of embracing the necessity of suffering and she even talks about like in the immense suffering that she inflicted often on herself or was inflicted on by outside circumstances that, you know, you can think of the egos after some amount of huge suffering, the ego itself starts to drop away or transform and in the midst of deep suffering, you can have these elated, almost a static, mystical, religious experiences. I just find that, you know, really, really interesting. And then there's also a lot of Spinoza in her, like just Spinoza's sort of self-abdication, his commitment to living very minimalistically, his dedication to the truth, no matter the cost to himself. There's parallels there, too. I just find that, you know, really interesting as well. Because I personally have a lot of love for Spinoza.

So let's go ahead and move on to how she eventually died. So how did Simone Vey eventually pass away? So she was in England at this time writing, and eventually she contracted tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized. And the doctors were very optimistic about this. They did these x-rays, and they said, oh, it's not that bad. If you rest, you should recover. But unfortunately, she basically refused to eat during this time. And this is, uh, there's a lot of mysteries and controversy here, which is actually kind of perfect going back to Dostoevsky.

All of Dostoevsky's characters would always suffer from two or three things simultaneously. Like people would be driven mad from grief, but they would also have brain fever at the same time. And then the grief would end and the brain fever would end simultaneously. He was kind of obsessed with this idea of spirituality and psychology and the physical combining all at once. So that's why her death is actually a perfect. It was exactly as he would have written it. But, so she began to refuse food, and there's controversy over this as well. The explanation she gave to the doctors was that the soldiers at the front were not eating,

which they probably were eating, but she was refusing it out of solidarity with the war, with the soldiers, with the suffering that they were going through. But also, simultaneously, she had very great digestive problems at this time. So she physically couldn't eat certain foods. She refused to drink milk because she wanted to, Um, she thought the milk should be saved for the English children. And the doctor's assured her that the food was all rationed and this was part of her ration, you know, it's fine. But she refused to drink milk, but also perhaps she couldn't digest milk at this time because she always had a very sensitive stomach and she was having digestive, possibly some kind of digestive disease simultaneously.

But the explanation that she gave to many of the doctors was this self-abignation explanation. and her cause of death was written as a suicide due to failure to eat because of what they put as they put like mental disturbance caused her failure to eat which is something I guess they write in England because suicide is illegal I don't know how they punish suicide

but they try to make it so like they don't want to write that you committed suicide they want to write that you went your mind was lost and that's the explanation I guess out of politeness so mental disturbance you can sort of disregard in that sense but it deepens the mystery because some people said she was kind of going mad at the end or like was incoherent and other people said she was perfectly coherent and was actually quite able to speak and give her ideas

so due to failing to eat more or less the disease did not get better and she was at last moved to a sanatorium she was asked she refused to some other pneumothorix treatment I guess they were going to remove a lung or something she refused that so the doctor said she's refusing treatment and they moved her to the sanatorium and very

I thought just a little touch at the end that was extremely ironic to me is that the people at the sanatorium heard that she was a philosophy professor and they thought that she shouldn't go to the sanatorium because that was a sanatorium that was filled with like working class people and

they thought that she would be uncomfortable among the working class and it's like obviously they didn't know her biography but she spent her entire life deeply working side by side with the working class

and was obviously comfortable around poor people or whatever they were worried about this problem so at the sanatorium her health deteriorated more and more and she refused to eat more and more again for this multitude of reasons

and died of tuberculosis slash starvation we don't quite know and up until the end sort of like I said before was working on this problem of whether or not she could get baptized and again like I said there was the mystery over the baptism as well at the end but she did eventually die of more or less starvation starvation which caused this tuberculosis to not be able to be healed and how old was she I think she was 34 34 somewhere something like that yeah damn so last question. This is what I always ask when we cover a historical figure. What do you think her legacy ultimately is and what can revolutionaries and radicals today learn from her and her life in your opinion? Well, learning from her life, I would say, is this kind of idea like that to really look at yourself and your own virtue and ask what you're doing. She had this idea that was sort of from the scriptures, but obviously she had been following for some time before she converted to Christianity, which is in any

given situation when you're involved in struggle you should do that which is hardest for yourself to do not that which is even tactically maybe what you think because tactics you can deceive yourself psychologically she was intensely worried that she had abandoned France because something deep in her psychology wanted to escape to America in order to be safe and that kind of thing we can get tactically fooled like you can tell yourself oh I'm going to America so that way I can go back to London to continue the fight, but secretly you might also desire to go to America because you know you're going to be safe from anti-Semitism. Like her parents fled to America because they were fleeing anti-Semitism.

She fled to America because she wanted to get to London. But then again, did she? Right. She was worried that maybe the anti-Semitism was the real reason. That would be a weakness in her soul, like a weakness. So she said, always do what's most difficult, and you're not going to run into that problem. It's a very Christian mindset, but it's one that you can think about how well are your actions mapping up to your ideas, right, in the existentialist sense. How well are you fulfilling your true ideas about what you should be doing in your life?

Because she was very worried that her life was going to pass her by and she was going to have accomplished nothing. Because life is very quick. So you have to do it, you know? From a political perspective, though, I would say to, if you read her essays or something, you're interested in, to think very deeply about the conditions that are necessary for a real revolution that's going to actually transform people's lives to take place. And it's possible, like she thought Marx deceived himself because he loved the idea of the revolution so much that he couldn't bear that it wasn't possible.

It is possible in any given historical moment that the glorious revolution that's coming, I mean, this would be obviously a moment. It doesn't look like it's possible right now. But at any given historical moment, this glorious revolution that a leftist might want emotionally may not be possible. And so you should not at that, maybe at that time, work towards the revolution, but towards building the possible necessary conditions that in the future might allow for this. In other words, you have to realize, you have to be not egocentric in your desire for leftist politics as well, because it may be that you are not going to live through these. great events and that your life might have to have meaning for leftist politics in allowing the conditions to be possible for the future right so you have to think very deeply about these

problems of not only what kind of society do you want after the revolution or what kind of revolution do you it's like you you have to think of what you can do in the here and now that can make things possible for a good future to ever exist and that's a very very difficult intellectual problem that she wrote a lot about. She writes about the nature of force. And I would say politically that would be the biggest lesson, is to really think deeply about what is possible. I love that.

I would just sort of reiterate this idea of selflessness and this idea of virtue ethics, which in layman's terms is like cultivating within yourself the characteristics that when put in a difficult moral position, and, you know, those characteristics that you've embedded into your personality sort of take over, and you can do the moral thing because you've cultivated a moral character, a virtuous character. And I really like that, and I think leftists can learn from that and from that selflessness, all of the great revolutionaries from Malcolm X, you know, Fred Hampton, Che Guevara, Rosa Luxembourg,

we can go down the line. They all have some degree of, like, selflessness. It's not about me and what I want in my ego. It's about other people, and I'm willing to die for that. And that's a beautiful thing. And sort of what you said is like, you know, planting trees that you'll never sit in the shade of, you know, doing work today that you might not see fully fulfilled, but that people in the future will. And in looking back, you'll have played your historical role and you'll have done so courageously and bravely.

And I think that's a lesson that we can learn in politics or not, but particularly in politics and particularly for the left in the situation we find ourselves today. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much, Corey, for coming on. It's been an honor. I love talking to you. Let's absolutely collaborate again in the future. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online.

Well, my comic is at existentialcomics.com, of course. And I'm on Twitter. If you search for existential comics, you should find me. And yeah, and like we said earlier, I went on partially examined life to talk about the analysis of oppression and the Iliad, the poem of force, which is a particularly good work to read because it's beautifully written. So if people are more interested in her political ideas during that kind of pessimistic phase she was in,

they can listen to that. And I'm probably going to go on partial examine life again and talk about the needs for roots. So look for that in the future. Awesome. Yeah. Shout out to PEL. I'll link to all of that in the show notes. And thank you again, Corey.

Let's keep in touch, all right? All right, cool. Thanks. Father, you know what I have been. And you know what I have done. I say that you see everything. I never heard no one What I have stolen won't be missed

I know who has so much so long I'll soon be laughing about this I'll never notice it was gone And I could bat in the universe If I can only get there first There's some foolish Fresh-led plans The fate is firmly in your hands

Take if you must take me But I cannot go peace for me I left someone waiting for me I left things so tell me On me Oh, oh. I say a man is just your seat spilled out on the thirsty earth

Simple serving of your needs From the moment of our birth Tell me a man on your seat Tell me if I know your son Tell me have you just forgotten Oh no she's a devotion Take if you must take me But I cannot go peacefully

But there's someone waiting for me I left things so terribly Oh no Oh no Oh no I don't know where I've been And you know what I have done He said I used to everything

So you know I never heard no one But I don't stall It won't be missed By those who had So much so long Soon we're laughing about this You'll never notice We are gone

Take if you must take me But I will not Go be as funny I left someone Waiting for me I left things so terrible great on the moon

You know, Thank you.